Python Languageshelve

Introduction

Shelve is a python module used to store objects in a file. The shelve module implements persistent storage for arbitrary Python objects which can be pickled, using a dictionary-like API.
The shelve module can be used as a simple persistent storage option for Python objects when a relational database is overkill. The shelf is accessed by keys, just as with a dictionary. The values are pickled and written to a database created and managed by anydbm.

Remarks

Note: Do not rely on the shelf being closed automatically; always call close() explicitly when you don’t need it any more, or use shelve.open() as a context manager:

with shelve.open('spam') as db:
db['eggs'] = 'eggs'

Warning:

Because the shelve module is backed by pickle, it is insecure to load a shelf from an untrusted source. Like with pickle, loading a shelf can execute arbitrary code.

Restrictions

1. The choice of which database package will be used (such as dbm.ndbm or dbm.gnu) depends on which interface is available. Therefore it is not safe to open the database directly using dbm. The database is also (unfortunately) subject to the limitations of dbm, if it is used — this means that (the pickled representation of) the objects stored in the database should be fairly small, and in rare cases key collisions may cause the database to refuse updates.

2.The shelve module does not support concurrent read/write access to shelved objects. (Multiple simultaneous read accesses are safe.) When a program has a shelf open for writing, no other program should have it open for reading or writing. Unix file locking can be used to solve this, but this differs across Unix versions and requires knowledge about the database implementation used.